Tom Stoppard's smart, provocative plays are magnets for audiences who crave theater that sparks both thought and emotion -- and for artists who relish the bottomless challenge of bringing the playwright's rich worlds to life.

When the Czech-born British writer's plays cross the Atlantic, they become must-see, much-honored theater in New York and at major companies around the United States. Those works include the nine-hour Coast of Utopia trilogy (about Russian intellectuals and the roots of radical politics), Jumpers, Travesties, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, The Invention of Love and Arcadia.

Yet those meaty plays are rarely produced by South Florida's professional theaters, doubtless for reasons ranging from cast size to the plays' intellectual heft. Stoppard's work has been neglected here since GableStage revived The Real Thing at the start of 2001.

That drought ends this weekend as Plantation's Mosaic Theatre kicks off its season with the playwright's most recent Broadway hit, Rock 'n' Roll.

Rehearsals for the play, which travels from Cambridge to Prague between 1968 and 1990, have been a frenzy of hard work, intellectual investigation, moments of illumination and occasional bouts of fear.

``I'm not smart enough for this,'' jokes Antonio Amadeo, who plays Stoppard's sort-of-alter ego Jan in Rock 'n' Roll. ``But this was written by someone who knows what he's doing. It's a joy to go home with my brain oozing out of my ears.''

A VAST CANVAS

Rock 'n' Roll is, in fact, daunting for everyone involved. Parts of its vast canvas include the Prague spring of 1968, when the Soviet Union brought a brutal end to the attempted reforms of Czech leader Alexander Dubcek; the Velvet Revolution of 1989, with the nonviolent overthrow of Gustáv Husák's repressive government and election of playwright/dissident Václav Havel as president; the Czech band Plastic People of the Universe; the music of Pink Floyd and founding member Roger ``Syd'' Barrett; Marxism; the poet Sappho -- well, there's more, much more.

Mosaic's artistic director, Richard Jay Simon, knew that Rock 'n' Roll would be a challenge for him, his cast, his designers and his audience. At first, he was put off by the size of the cast: Though the script's 19 roles can be played by a dozen actors, that's still a large and expensive company.

But having worked hard since he founded Mosaic in 2001 to build it into the kind of theater that won six Carbonell Awards in April, and having fallen in love with the play, Simon felt ready for a challenge that would make his brain tingle.

``I don't remember a project where I had to cram so much into my brain,'' he says. ``Communism, Sappho, mythology, politics, all of the political figures in Czechoslovakia -- I hardly knew anything. You worry whether the audience will get it, even if you have a guide in the program. But if we tell the story and make the relationships compelling, then it's OK. His plays are a little bit dense, but they're meant to be seen, not read. . . . The storytelling is incredibly rich.''

Anchoring the cast are three Carbonell Award-winning actors: Gordon McConnell, Laura Turnbull and Amadeo. Simon says he chose them because he knew -- beyond their obvious talent -- the discipline, thirst for research and depth of understanding they could bring to their roles and to the play itself.

McConnell plays Max, a prickly British professor and unrepentant Communist who's angry that his protegé Jan has decided to return to Prague to fight for reform.

In the first act, Turnbull plays Max's wife Eleanor, a classical scholar who's dying of cancer; in the second, she's their daughter Esme, an ex-hippie who once fancied Jan.

WHAT IF?

Amadeo sees the music-loving Jan as the celebrated Stoppard ``in an alternate universe, asking what if he had gone back to Czechoslovakia.'' (He didn't, though he became a translator of Havel's work.)

None of the actors has ever done a Stoppard play. Turnbull has done research about Eleanor's academic field, focusing on people she knows who have fought cancer and refused to give up, developing a different personality and voice for Esme. It is, she says, ``very exciting. I'm happy to come to rehearsal.''

McConnell has used a bit of family history -- his uncle Kenneth McLachlan was a passionate Scottish communist -- to find his way into Max.

``He's a hard-line ideological communist who has no idea that the practical application of this great idea is not working,'' says the actor, who likens Max's personality to the prickly lead character on TV's House.

And all those references, all that history?

``The bottom line is characterization,'' says McConnell. ``We all have our characters solid. The history is an overlay.''

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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